RICE plays the RACE card:
In Dallas, Rice focused on the Middle East, with a speech to the National Association of Black Journalists (search) that mirrored an opinion piece she wrote for Thursday's Washington Post.
Rice said the Middle East is represented by 22 countries with a combined population of 300 million and gross domestic product that equals that of Spain, whose population is only 40 million.
Rice said the political and economic freedom deficit in the Middle East provides fertile ground for homicide bombers. She also likened Iraq's struggle with democracy to America's civil rights movement, asking the journalists to reject the argument that some groups are incapable of democracy.
"Knowing what we know about the difficulties of our own history, knowing what we know about how hard it is to build democracy, we need to be humble in singing freedom's praises. But we should not let our voice waver in speaking out on the side of people who are seeking freedom," she told the 1,200 journalists.
Rice said the liberation of Iraq offers new opportunities for the region. Just as Germany became a linchpin of Europe after World War II, a democratic Iraq can become a key element in a Middle East where hate doesn't flourish.
"We must have patience and perseverance to see it through," Rice said.
Rice has faced sharp criticism for allowing Bush to assert in the January State of the Union (search) that Iraq was trying to buy uranium (search) from Africa, and the journalists in Dallas questioned her actions Thursday.
Rice and other aides have defended themselves in part by pointing to the fact that doubts about the intelligence appeared in a footnote, written by the State Department, buried deep in a top-secret National Intelligence Estimate (search). That footnote was thus not read by Bush, Rice or other top aides, said a senior White House official last month.
But Rice said Thursday she had read the NIE "cover to cover, a couple of times."
She reiterated her remorse for the episode, saying that "whenever something like this happens to the president, I feel responsible because I am his national security adviser."
But she also repeated her contention that that element of the speech was not critical to Bush's case for war.
"The most appalling thing about this whole incident was that it for a two-week period had us discussing whether Saddam Hussein tried to get yellowcake (search) in Africa, when of course the president did not go to war over whether Saddam Hussein tried to get yellowcake from Africa," she said.
Rice said she is working on changes to "make certain we don't have to depend on people's memories from one speech to another."
Fox News' Wendell Goler contributed to this report.http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,94068,00.html
Rascal @IAmOvercome.com |
